I'm seriously stalled on my writing.
Programming has been taking up an awful lot of my time recently. It might be the medication; I finally have the right meds to support my brain's capacity to program like never before, and I've been coding my heart out, both professionally and as a hobby, and the results have been astounding.
But in writing, I'm stalled. Two years ago, I wrote a Frozen/Honor Harrington fanfic that I put up on Archive Of Our Own, and it was pretty well-received. As a joke, I mentioned on my Tumblr that I might write more of them, and got a surprising wave of cheerful requests for more Frozen stuff. So I opened up a new blank file and started typing. Just as the first story was very much a critique of space opera in general and David Weber in particular, the second was going to follow the same path but try to do something different and address the neoreactionary movement. I wanted to do another Captain Anna / Lost Colony Elsa kind of thing, but with a really different and darker theme. I started with the premise of a book called The Cleanest Race, which is about how North Korea's internal civil religion centers on the idea that NorKor's people have the cleanest, purest, "best" genetics in the world, while the rest of the world suffers from being "genetic mongrels." According to the NorKor civil religion, we're ultimately doomed to die in our uncleanliness, but in the meantime we have a stash of brutes, geniuses, and demagogues who threaten to overwhelm NorKor and wipe out their purity, and that's why they're so poor, and why they must fight so hard, and remain so insular.
So I was going for a Star Trek Anna and a Warhammer: 40K Elsa, where the latter learns that her peoples' view of the Federation is about as eff'd up as you can imagine. I started to get down into the weeds about how white racism has evolved a "white separatist" movement whose central arguments echo the NorKor propaganda— purity isn't necessarily strength, but there is a strain of "pure whiteness" and it deserves its own "safe space" protected from the mongrels and brutes. It worked for a while because, you know, Elsa is really, really pale.
But now the story's a mess and I don't have an ending. And I really need to strip out anything that feels too much of the mallet-to-the-head.
Sigh.